Moviegate: President Obama functionaries seem to have selectively targeted a pesky filmmaker

Chris Christie has his Bridgegate; President Obama his MoviegateAndrew Mills/ The Star-Ledger

Move over Bridgegate. The real political scandal now is Moviegate, in which President Obama’s lieutenants seem to have used the law enforcement powers of the federal government in conjunction with campaign finance laws to attempt to silence a popular moviemaker critical of the White House.

If the conservative filmmaker has indeed been selectively targeted, Moviegate will prove to be yet another serious misuse of power by the nation’s chief executive and his aides. (It follows President Obama’s recent pronouncements that he will use executive power to bypass Congress.)

As this new alleged misuse of power represents a direct assault on political free speech, this latest episode of President Obama’s misrule will make Chris Christie’s alleged tit-for-tat increase in bridge traffic pale by comparison.

And so, to Movie-gate: Just before the 2012 election, conservative author Dinesh D’Souza released a documentary movie that made the case that Barack Obama is motivated by a well-disguised, anti-American agenda.

“2016: Obama’s America,” based on the filmmaker’s bestselling book, played well among conservative audiences, but was mostly ignored by a media largely enthralled with President Obama.

Two years after the first movie was released, D’Souza is completing a new movie, scheduled for release this summer. Like his first movie, “America” takes an unflattering look at President Obama and his politics. Specifically, the new movie refutes President Obama’s mantra that government must “fix” economic “inequality” so that everyone gets his “fair share.”

Given that President Obama has ridden to power on the theme of “the rich” stealing from the rest of us, the White House and his loyal lieutenants cannot be happy with D’Souza’s dissenting voice. Meanwhile, President Obama is expected to continue his theme of “economic inequality” during Tuesday’s State of the Union speech.

It now turns out that a federal “investigation” into D’Souza was launched around the time of the 2012 election. And so, the filmmaker was indicted by federal authorities over the weekend on a technical violation of campaign finance laws.

This arbitrary prosecution of a dissenting filmmaker should make anyone who values political free speech in this nation stand up and take notice.

The announcement that D’Souza was about to be indicted was first reported by The Hollywood Reporter over the weekend. The Drudge Report posted a link to the report.

As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, D’Souza stands accused of donating more than the legal limit to the failed campaign of Wendy Long, who ran unsuccessfully in 2012 for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. The conservative author and would-be Senator have been friends since they were students at Dartmouth College in the 1980s. Long was not included in the indictment.

The indictment alleges that D’Souza donated $20,000 to Long’s campaign by collecting the money from several people and falsely reporting the source of the money, The Hollywood Reporter added.

The charge is politically motivated, Gerald Molen, a co-producer of “2016,” told the publication. “In America,” Molen said, “we have a long tradition of not doing what is commonly done in too many other countries – criminalizing dissent through the selective enforcement of the law.”

It is not difficult to see how such a prosecution of a dissenting voice would work, and how difficult it would be to trace any possible connection to the White House.

In the former Soviet Union, jaywalking was a crime, although most people were never prosecuted for it – unless the authorities didn’t like you. In a similar way, all sorts of technical violations of campaign finance laws occur from time to time. The campaign finance laws can be, after all, quite complex.

D’Souza, it appears, wanted to help an old college friend (who seemed unlikely to win in any case) and did not pay attention to the technicalities of the law. D’Souza denies any criminal intent.

Meanwhile, “2016: Obama’s America,” which warned viewers of what a second Obama term might mean – a forecast that has turned out to be eerily prescient -- was enormously popular. Who can doubt that all the President’s men took notice?

And so, because enforcement of technical violations of the campaign finance laws is somewhat subjective, who actually gets charges filed against them can easily be influenced by the tone set by the chief executive. Responding to such pressure is, of course, unethical.

Without a doubt, President Obama has set the most partisan tone at the White House in decades. D’Souza’s movie, with its spot-on portrayal of President Obama, cannot have sat well with him.

So, did President Obama order the investigation of the errant filmmaker? No, there likely was nothing as unsophisticated -- or traceable -- as a direct instruction. Why leave fingerprints? It is much more likely that someone in the vast federal bureaucracy, or perhaps one of President Obama’s chief aides, sensing the tone in the White House, took some career-building initiative.

In an earlier era, when Henry II, the 12th century English king, found his minister, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket, uncooperative over the rights of the crown, he did not need to dispatch his minions to do away with the recalcitrant churchman. The king merely suggested aloud that he was tired of the troublesome priest.

More recently, the IRS targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups opposed to President Obama by delaying approval of their tax-exempt status, making donors more reluctant to contribute funds.

That bureaucratic foot-dragging had the effect of discouraging (or canceling) any efforts the targeted organizations might have taken to persuade voters in the run-up to the 2012 election. That strategy to silence one’s political opponents, it now seems apparent, reflected the tone at the top. The IRS actions, too, were carried out with few “fingerprints” visible.

So why do we in New Jersey care about all this? In the so-called “Bridge-gate” scandal, few if any have suggested that Gov. Chris Christie directly ordered the closing of traffic lanes approaching the George Washington Bridge. It seems that aides, picking up the tone from the top, acted on their own initiative.

At worst, Bridgegate had local results. It was not an assault on our nation’s cherished freedom to vigorously disagree with the President. Even Gov. Christie’s second “scandal” – an alleged quid pro quo over Sandy relief – is, by that measure, small potatoes.

By contrast, if President Obama’s lieutenants selectively targeted a conservative critic who has released one movie and is expected to release a second film critical of their boss, that alleged misuse of political power is a much more serious matter.